'Make do and mend gave way to spend, spend, spend' ... Never Had It So Good? Photograph: BBC

Never Had It So Good? (BBC4) came embossed with gleaming puns and friendly exclamations. Presented by historian Colin Shindler ("I'm Colin Shindler!"), it took a gander at 1957, the year in which make do and mend finally gave way to spend, spend, spend.

Colin and the documentary's attendant flurry of pleasingly youthful historian types were keen to point out then-PM Harold Macmillan's hands-on approach to public relations. "He was essentially an actor," enthused one, while others tipped their mortarboards at his innate "showmanship". Said chutzpah was illustrated by footage of the acclaimed japester sitting behind his prime ministerial desk and smiling weakly at someone standing to his right, before turning his vast moustache to camera and - wait for it - smiling weakly at us. And they say Disraeli had the best jokes. Add this to the events that defined 1957 - the introduction of the supermarket, the Russians blasting a dog into space and the thigh-slapping pantomime that was the Windscale fire ("Mr Stan Ritson was radioactive for four days ... ") - and it's a wonder we were able to stop laughing for long enough to get anything done.

But we did. Colin certainly did. Subtitled 1957, Macmillan and Me, this was history observed through the then-seven-year-old's viewfinder, a personal touch that lent a boyish giddiness to the ensuing best-of-times/worst-of-times collage of belching Manchester chimneys, plimsoll- wielding schoolmarms and prim models in mink: the dizzy thrill, rather than the shock, of the new. But above all, Never Had It So Good? was about Mrs Shindler, or, as Colin referred to her, "Mother". An antsy sort, Mother's influence hung over the documentary, and Colin, like a dissatisfied cloud. She was, the historian told us, "overprotective". She considered ITV "dead common" and assured her son that, should he fail his 11-plus, she would "stick her head in the oven".

"My mother even disapproved of Blackpool rock. I still feel guilty buying one of these things," said Colin, waggling a stick of the contraband confection. A wry, spring-heeled thing, Never Had It So Good? nevertheless ended not with a question mark but actually with a full stop. Mother, we learned, had died of a brain haemorrhage while Colin was still a child. "In due course, I replaced my family of 1957 with one of my own. And with them, I know I've lived a good life," he concluded, as we gazed at an unaccountably sad photograph of the historian guffawing, 1970s-ishly, with his wife and two small children. Mother, one imagines, would almost have been proud.

In the final episode of Nigella Express (BBC2), Nigella showed us how to spoon some tinned peaches into a jar. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this involved a spoon, some tinned peaches and a jar. But because this was Nigella Express, it also involved other, posher stuff, including some "crushed cherries," a surfeit of startlingly loud and unpleasantly organic sound effects ("SHMULP ... GLUB ... SPLUTCH ... ") and extra cloves, "for that pungent muskiness". The camera leered at the resulting mess. Under the studio lights, the imprisoned fruit glistened like dozens of tiny, damp buttocks. "Who wouldn't want to be given this as a present?" she oozed, as a flurry of Christmas strings rushed in to drown out our howls of dissent.

Bum-jars duly prepared, it was time for a climactic "seasonal supper," at which guests gathered to tell Nigella how wonderful she was while pawing her voluptuous seasonal comestibles. Who were these people? God knows. The scene appeared to have been filmed through some sort of Festive Wooziness filter, resulting in a blur of unidentifiable body parts, vague impressions of expensive knitwear and sudden, jarringly clear shots of anonymous faces shot from peculiar angles, such as just behind an ear or over a shoulder. It was like that bit in A Question of Sport where you have to guess the sports personality from a series of jerky nose and eyebrow shots.

Still, it was a fittingly tipsy end to a series that wallowed, unapologetically, in self-indulgence, its "message" - that eating is the ultimate in self-reward/ aspirational smuggery - curiously exacerbated by the fact that we couldn't actually make any of the ensuing Hot Eating Action out. How very ... Nigellacious.